A ranking is an opinion. A sum of money is not
Every prioritization framework produces a ranking and stops there. A ranking gets argued with, because it is an opinion with a number attached, and the loudest person in the room has an opinion too.
This page produces the ranking and then prices the disagreement. Running the list in the order on the table, when the model recommends another, costs a specific amount of money, and that figure is what ends the argument. In the worked example it is forty-eight thousand euros, which is more than most of the items are worth in a quarter.
Where the figure comes from
One team doing one item at a time finishes each item at the sum of the durations up to and including it. Every week before that is a week the item’s value is not being collected. So the total cost of delay of a sequence is the sum, over items, of the value a week of delay costs times the week the item lands.
That sum is smallest when the items are ordered by their weekly value divided by their duration. The quantity has a name in the literature, CD3, and the result is a scheduling theorem, which is to say it is proved and not proposed: the best order is the best order, and anything else costs the difference.
The chart shows what that difference does over time. Both orders deliver everything by the same week, so both curves rise at the same rate once the last item has landed. The gap between them stops growing and never closes. Doing the right thing second does not catch up.
Why the big one first is a trap
The default order in most rooms is by size: the biggest number goes first because it is the biggest number.
The worked example is built to show what that costs. The checkout rebuild is worth five times what the shipping-cost change is worth, and putting it first is the expensive choice, because ten weeks of everything else waiting is dearer than two weeks of the rebuild waiting. The small valuable item goes first, every time, and the arithmetic says by how much.
This is the one result worth taking away even if you never open the page again. Duration belongs in the ranking, and it belongs as a divisor.
Where the value comes from
The weakest input here is the yearly value of each item, and it is the one the page cannot help with on its own.
What it can do is take the number from somewhere defensible. The funnel model on this site computes what one percentage point on a given step is worth a year, with every step after it applied, and it carries that figure into this page with its own link. Then the item at the top of your list has a value with a model behind it, where before it had a number somebody said in a workshop.
For the rest, the honest approach is a range. Run the list at your figure and again at half of it. If the order holds, the order holds. If it flips, you have found the argument the team should be having.
RICE, and what it cannot do
RICE is in the method selector because teams use it and it is a reasonable way to think. It is reach times impact times confidence divided by effort, and it is in the tool computed exactly that way.
What it cannot do is price anything. The score has no unit. Two teams cannot compare their scores, because reach means something different in each. The same team cannot compare across quarters, because the impact ladder drifts. And no score can be turned into money, so there is no sum that the wrong RICE order costs, which is why the headline figure goes blank when you switch to it.
That is the comparison this page is making. The same four opinions, expressed in money and weeks, produce a number a finance partner can check. Expressed as a score, they produce a ranking that only the team that made it can read.
What this leaves out
One team, one item at a time, no dependencies, and value that starts the week the item lands.
Real roadmaps break all three. Teams run two things in parallel, items block each other, and value ramps up over weeks. Each of those changes the figure, and none of them changes the shape: duration belongs in the ranking, and the order has a price.
Fixed dates are the exception worth naming. An item that is worthless after a date, a regulatory deadline or a trade show, does not have a constant cost of delay and this model will rank it wrongly. Those go at the top by hand, and then the rest of the list is what this page is for.